The people running this village are incredible! They wake up at 5:00am, have a quiet time for reflection, get together at 7:15am to pray, and then start their whirlwind days. Each person wears multiple hats:
• Debbie, the village director, amongst her management duties, teachers in the mornings and then tutors children in the afternoon.
• Bonnie is a full time teacher for Kindergarten.
• Barb manages the Junior Secondary School programs and serves as the main instructor. (Barb is front right, sitting with the complete Malawi ROS team.)
• Laura manages the children’s nutrition, along with the food service staff, and teaches math in the Junior Secondary School.
• Ralph, the village business manager, also supervises all physical plant work being completed in the village including grounds keeping, maintenance, and security. (Ralph and his wife Bonnie picking me up at the airport.)
• Elaine serves as village doctor, manages the welfare of all the children and the training program for the village mothers. Whew, these daily miracle workers are busy! Elaine was a constant source of treats, from fresh fruit to warm banana bread from the oven. (Elaine, on the right, with Laura, dropping me off at the airport.)
• Five full-time Mommas take care of the children night and day in five separate cottages and several Aunties and Mothers in training pitch in as well.
• There are ten outside contract workers “slashing” the grass back down to the ground. Everything is done by hand in what seems like the most rudimentary process possible. There is more than ample local labor so this gang of human lawn mowers is armed with long bent metal blades that are swung with pure arm strength back and forth to cut the tall grasses back to size.
• And finally there is a full time grounds crew and multiple shifts of village guards. (Picture after completing the construction portion of the new satelite dish setup.)
The kids are also miraculous. It is fun to watch the kids run, play, eat, and especially sing.
I had the real pleasure of eating nsima with the children during lunch. Nsima is a local starch and staple of life for the populous of Malawi. It is corn or maze as it is called here ground to flour then re-hydrated to form a pasty white ball. This starchy, low nutritional value “blob” is then eaten with beans and today cabbage. I could hardly get mine down, as it was just so voluminous and foreign. There were no issues with taste or flavor, just pure volume. Amazingly even the littlest children ate their entire serving. How they could wolf it down was truly surprising, but totally common for them.
While visiting the village I had the good fortune of seeing three new orphans arrive to become welcome additions to their new families. Joseph, Lonnie, and Nixon each have a distinct personality and bring their own energy and joy. Joseph is the smallest and most mal-nourished of the new additions. He is approximately three years old but the size of an eighteen month old and waddles on bowed legs from rickets. He is quiet and getting used to the new environment. The saddest thing is that when he was picked up from his village it was obvious to all that Joseph was uncared for and he had no detachment issues with his relative caregivers.
Lonnie is cute as can be and has big bright eyes. She cried for her Gogo or grandmother, the first night she spent with her new family in the Rafiki village. Her grandmother had named her “Lonely” since both her parents had died of AIDS and she felt that best described her fate without parents.
Now she has brothers and sisters to play with and a loving new Mother with Rafiki. In the week and a half since she joined the village she has perked up and is so proud to show off her new dresses. During an “All Village” staff meeting Bonnie and I watched/played with all the children in the library room. Poor Lonnie was terrified to be left by her new Momma with these two mazungas or white people. My heart broke for her, as she had no idea that her new Momma would be right back to pick her up in an hour. Bonnie sat with Lonnie in her lap and cuddled her. Before the end of the hour Lonnie was smiling again. The beautiful part of this story is that Lonnie was so excited to be reunited with her new bonded mother.
Nixon, named after his father, who was named after the president, came from the most loving environment of the three. His mother, who was in stage three AIDS made the very difficult decision to place him with Rafiki prior to passing-on. Her love for him carries on in this joyful bundle of energy. He is a junior linebacker in training or as the southerners at the village say, “a chunk”. From his first day Nixon has been adventuresome, wandering across the dining hall after lunch to come sit in my lap and then climbing down to run to the end of the tables and roll on the floor. He has a joyful soul and continues to become more expressive each day.
Nothing beats an "spontaneous nap" with a full tummy.
Are you ready for my pitch? Each one of these children is in need of a sponsor. A sponsor provides the needed support to help feed, clothe, house, and educate a child. In return you can correspond or even come to visit your newest niece or nephew. In Africa and Malawi most adults have the privilege of being considered Aunts or Uncles. So while in the village the children called me “Uncle Paul”. To be a full sponsor is a $100/month commitment or you can be a half sponsor by giving $50/month. It is truly life altering to see Rafiki in action and the immediate impact the organization makes on the lives of these formerly endangered children. (I have a strong degree of confidence that this fact is still true since attending Rafiki training in June; Rafiki is a rare NGO in that 100% of sponsorship funds actually go to the children. The foundation’s overhead has been covered by a generous donor so your care commitment really goes to the children.) If you are interested in sponsoring a child, please send me an e-mail at plaubscher@gmail.com and I can put you in contact with the proper contacts or check out the Rafiki Foundation website, www.rafiki-foundation.org.
One of my great challenges and joys while visiting the Mzuzu Rafiki Village was to take over the Junior Secondary School math class for a couple of weeks. This turned into an amazing experience. I honestly felt the rush that teachers talk about in describing the feeling when their students are actually learning something new. This class of seventeen girls was a challenge for the internationally recognized reason of “making math interesting” to teenagers. So, we dove into daily local experience word problems and challenged each other with group and individual daily verbal quizzes. These weren’t graded but used to teach and keep everyone engaged. Don’t worry, this wasn’t the ominous task master type engagement, but as simple as answering flash card equations as a group at the beginning of class and then individually before leaving at the end of class.
The largest bridges to cross, in teaching these girls, were the language barriers between Tambuca and English. For instance, the simple word problem of “Mary brought three dozen cupcakes to school. How many cupcakes did she bring?” This baffled them because the concept of a dozen equaling twelve was foreign. So we also converted problems from Dollars into Kwatcha, the local currency, and miles into kilometers. I loved it when they would giggle or laugh when a concept finally sunk in. After this experience there is definitely a found respect for the volume of work and effort that is required to teach. If one is diligent in tracking each child’s progress through homework and exams, while keeping the class as a whole in mind, the process can easily turn into a statistical model. Oops, yep, I did create an Excel spreadsheet to manage the whole thing. Hey, it was a math class…
After study hall, each day, the girls have a few hours of skill training. For Malawi the local skill is wood carving. These girls do a great job of creating creatures and other wood items from raw chunks of timber. There are no pre-hewn blocks but trees, branches and stumps that the girls tool into beautiful craft work.
The weather and cloud formations of the Southern Hemisphere continue to amaze. The stunning views are accentuated by the multi-layered formations. It is not uncommon to see cumulous, stratus, cirrus, and cumulonimbus clouds all in the same horizon. The clouds seem to layer on top of a base of ground fog and ascend thousands of feet above. In the evening Malawi produces phenomenal cloud accented sunsets, rivaled only by New Zealand.
Given that February is in the heart of the rainy season, down pours are a daily and voluminous experience. The gullies can go from dry to overflowing in a matter of minutes. The flash flooding is helped along by the dense red clay soil. The opportunity for absorption can be relatively low unless the surface has been loosened and worked prior to the rain. A beautiful result of these sometimes fast moving storms is the chance to seeing rainbows. Since the cloud deck is relatively low, by Northern Hemisphere comparisons, these colorful arches are lower to the ground and stretched out.
Africa is of course known for its wildlife, specifically the Big Five game animals and mosquitoes, but what really interested me was other smaller creatures. Ants build large donut-like nests and have little difficulty climbing inside your pant leg to feast on your flesh. Yikes, and yes this is from experience.
White jacket crows still make the same annoying call, even with their famcy white bodies.
There are grasshoppers...
... and cricket like insects which make a snapping sound when leaping/flying through the air and sometimes go for a "free ride" in the car.
I heard it said by a biologist on NPR that one tells the health of an ecosystem by the volume of dragon flies. Needless to say, Malawi is covered with them. There have been swarms of hundreds at a single time.
I’m not sure if the blue herons eat these insects but their presence on the Rafiki campus is awesome. Watching them strut through the grasses, then lumber into flight is addictive.
Sometimes it is a little shocking to see the size of common creatures, like a snail that is almost half the size of your hand.
The butterflies deserve mention as well. Their rich colors seem inherently at home in Africa.
Finally, as a parting gift, some baboons decided to come out of the woods to great us on the way to the airport.
The people of Malawi are some of the most generous in spirit encountered on the trip thus far. They proudly refer to Malawi as the “heart of Africa”, not due to its geographic location that is not continentally centered, but because of the warmth of her people. Walking to Mzuzu, a 5 Km trek along the side of the road, as an azungu one can’t help but be noticed and greeted. This is especially true if you are carrying a camera. Mzuzu natives love to have their picture taken and will solicit a “snap” as they call it. (Like these kids who called me over to take their picture in the doorway to their home.)
The challenging part is that after sharing the digital image on the LCD back of the camera, most people actually “want” the picture. I had to explain to many that the picture is actually stored on a little card and doesn’t come out of the camera. Those who understood the camera concept wanted me to go to a store to have pictures made, but there were no stores in Mzuzu that could print from SD cards.
Society in Malawi marches to a distinct structure. Men work outside the home and women may work outside if the husband is employed and permits. This has provided challenges where families are left in deterred conditions because of an unemployed husband refusing to allow the wife to accept employment due to the social stigma attached to him.
AIDS has spread beyond the customary singles scene to encompass families, due in large part to the tradition that it is considered socially unacceptable for a man to sleep with his wife within two years of child birth. For the average viral, early twenties, man this is simply too long a time to be celibate. So extramarital affairs are common. The husband then has an incubation period and brings HIV to his wife after the twenty-four months come to fruition.
This is the scenario that leads to both parents dieing, leaving their offspring in the care of relatives. Of course this does not account for all the deaths but is a large contributor to the Malawi trend. Just as in the United States, none are immune and all are at risk that take part regardless of religious affiliation, stature, or governmental position. The local irony was when the Mzuzu government representative in charge of social welfare and AIDS education was herself diagnosed. Over 20 percent of people tested for HIV are positive. Given the social stigma associated with even being tested, the actual number of HIV carriers is much higher and estimated to be twice that figure. The streets are noticeably empty of thirty-something adults.
For one of the poorest countries on earth, there is an overabundance of NGO activities. The government feeds on aid. The bureaucratic system is design to soak money from NGO’s and pilfer foreign government funds. A recent review of US aid to Malawi for malaria revealed that 90% of funding was either embezzled or went to government infrastructure, e.g. cars. Why Range Rovers are needed instead of standard vehicles is an obvious question. Power definitively corrupts, even when your people are malnourished, starving, and dieing of AIDS in record numbers. The best way to provide true help to actual people in need, that I’ve witnessed, is through smaller NGO’s that fly lower on the corruption radar screen. Government to government aid is easily accomplished and a recipe for non-accountability.
Finally, the glue that holds much of Malawi together is church. There are many different Christian faiths represented, as well as Islam, Buddhism, and others. I attended two different churches that were each packed with over 500 people. The singing was incredible, in complete three-part acapella harmony. The two churches were at opposite ends of the timeline. First was Katawa, a newer structure, followed by Equin Deni, one of the original brick missionary churches from the 1800’s.
Both employ the tradition of having visitors come to the front of the church for an introduction. When one says, “Good morning congregation”, be prepared for a thunderous response.
